Brewer’s Friend is a website that features a wide range of beer brewing tools and calculators for a wide range of purposes, most of which are completely free. The range of resources is fairly decent, with charts, brew sheets, guides, infographics, and various calculators for all levels of brewing. While these individual features are useful […]

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This guide contains technical brewing jargon which may be unfamiliar to some home brewers and also to people who speak English as a second language. If you need assistance with a particular term, please leave a comment below the article and I will be glad to help. If you want to try out […]

“Pre-Prohibition Lager” Brooklyn Lager is a beer that is extremely difficult to define. Even the producer, the excellent Brooklyn Brewery, alternates between claiming this beer is an Amber Lager and a Vienna Lager, and also occasionally adds phrases such as British dry hopping and American Original. It’s all very vague and could be confusing – […]

The Speidel Braumeister was the first of the all-in-one systems that I had ever heard of. Needless to say, I was in love. Even in commercial craft breweries, I had never seen an automatic step-mash control! Of course, I know better now, but at the time my mind was completely blown. I had to see […]

The UK craft beer industry has experienced solid growth in the last ten years. There are now more than 1,400 craft breweries in the United Kingdom, a growth of more than 10% compared to the year before, and more than 30% over the past three years. 204 new breweries have opened in the past 12 […]

There are many kegging systems available to the home brewer, from a mobile picnic cooler and bicycle pump to the glorious in-line chillers used widely across Asia. For many, a compact and cost-effective system is ideal. Enter the Kegerator A kegerator is essentially a small refrigerator, modified or even purpose built to fit a beer […]

When I first bought a home brewing keg kit it was a quantum leap for my little home brew setup. It was a little tricky though – I tried to do it on the cheap and by myself, so it took a while before I could serve anything on tap! All keg kits share some […]

Yesterday I wrote a guide to filtering beer commercially and at home, with some brief details on the more generally favored models. Today, I want to go into more details for those of you who may be considering giving this a try for yourselves. This is a home brew filter comparison between the cartridge filter […]

Producing a clear beer has been the goal of brewers for eons, despite several examples which call for intentional haze. For the homebrewer this is particularly difficult without the use of a commercial beer filter and packaging line. However, beer filtering equipment is out there and can make a huge difference. Before I go into […]

While brewing in China I quickly realized that common pale ale recipes were not going to do as well as they do in the West due to the particular tastes of the local and expat beer drinking crowds. Continued trial and error led to a new, Chinese inspired pale ale recipe. China consumes more beer […]